


Always Going, Never Getting

by angeloncewas



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Anarchist Syndicate on Dream Team SMP (Video Blogging RPF), Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Dialogue Light, Families of Choice, Gen, Manberg Festival on Dream Team SMP (Video Blogging RPF), Non-Linear Narrative, Respawn Mechanics, Toby Smith | Tubbo-centric, Traumatized Toby Smith | Tubbo, no beta we die like he does, the three-lives system
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 02:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30099069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angeloncewas/pseuds/angeloncewas
Summary: Then: Tommy and Wilbur and Tubbo are together and Niki is on their side and L'manberg issomething,if not everything.Now: none of that is true.-Tubbo doesn’t know how to sayif I ever hear the letters “m-a-n-b-e-r-g” in succession again, it will be too soon,andI came here to mourn you onceandaren’t you burning, stuck in the sun, chasing Wilbur’s shadow?
Relationships: Toby Smith | Tubbo & Niki | Nihachu, Toby Smith | Tubbo & Ranboo, Toby Smith | Tubbo & Technoblade, Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit & Wilbur Soot
Comments: 17
Kudos: 77





	Always Going, Never Getting

**Author's Note:**

> Combined [an old headcanon of mine](https://angeloncewas.tumblr.com/post/641948671416614912/hc-that-tubbo-built-snowchester-with-pogtopia-in) with my fixation on the Syndicate to create this.

There is a flame of revolution and a burning hot dog sculpture on top of a drug van, which is to say that the sky is blue and Fundy is wearing a crayon suit and Wilbur has just yelled at Dream to “suck it” of all things.

Wilbur is armorless and fearless and he spells their futures out like a waltz on steady legs. Giving a sprawling speech as fireworks go off in the distance, he declares himself president before handing Tubbo the Decree of Independance.

Tubbo is no longer a supply-runner, at least not in name. He’s secretary of state, and Tommy is treasurer, and they aren’t makeshift vagabonds anymore. They are structured, there is purpose, they are a people.

He has no idea what the title means, but he preens nonetheless, ignoring Tommy’s jabs about his appointment being a rash decision.

Treasurer and secretary. Tubbo makes a note to figure out which one’s higher-ranked later, when they’re not precariously standing on the roof of a vehicle that has never moved and will never do so.

He thinks of asking Eret for a second - they would know, and they would have time to explain, and Tommy wouldn’t be able to get them to lie - but then another bout of explosions go off and Tubbo is taken back to blackstone, to betrayal, to the thing that pushed their success forward.

Tubbo silently reprimands himself for the lapse in judgment and refocuses on Wilbur, who’s ruffling Fundy’s hair and grinning like a madman, glowing with success as the newfound leader of L’manberg.

* * *

Tubbo breathes in the cold air and feels it spiral around his lungs, press flush against the web of scars that crawl down his left side before climbing up and leaving him in a puff of smoke and substance.

Tommy wants him to live in the dirt hut that was the L’manberg Embassy. Says they’re better together, something fragile and fleeting behind his gaze, locked in with the tears he never cried for someone he considered his brother and a million words too personal to utter out loud.

Tubbo understands, he really does. The want to touch what’s still in front of you and hold it tight; L’manberg is a togetherness and everyone has grown apart.

Tommy makes sense, no matter how many people insist the contrary.

That doesn’t mean Tubbo agrees with him.

It’s a tricky thing to explain, especially to someone whom you’ve never had to exchange words with, just looks and laced-together fingers and silent promises, but Tommy doesn’t _get it_ and Tubbo doesn’t know how to say _if I ever hear the letters “m-a-n-b-e-r-g” in succession again, it will be too soon,_ and _I came here to mourn you once_ and _aren’t you burning, stuck in the sun, chasing Wilbur’s shadow?_

That’s what the snow is for. The bitter cold, the way it rips at his skin and leaves whatever’s underneath exposed. Words don’t seem important when the wind speaks for him, takes his thoughts and casts them forward in place of all the silences he’s left behind.

Tubbo doesn’t know what he wants to build, not really, not since his house was burnt to send a message the very first time, but he likes the idea of being anywhere other than where he’s always been. Of being a part of everything the rest of the world isn’t.

A place to just be. An encampment for the lost.

He decides to call it Snowchester.

* * *

Over the walls of some building, one of the many pieces of an unsteady country, Tubbo watches Tommy’s expression shift when he utters the cue-words Wilbur decided on.

In the venn-diagram of decision-making and also loyalty to land as opposed to people, Tubbo falls in the middle. He always falls in the middle. His limbs stretch when Schlatt calls for him and Tommy sits at their bench and Wilbur watches him with narrowed eyes.

Today’s different. He’s not allowed to be neutral. Not when Wilbur grins and hands him a grenade and suggests he pull the pin.

Destruction’s epicenter is the most dangerous place to be.

The disaster, should it come, will be unnatural, but what it ultimately comes down to is that he will choose Tommy. No matter the question, his best friend is the answer, and the price of asking is more than either of them can realistically afford.

Tommy is not allowed in Manberg. Tommy is the enemy of the state. Tommy’s head dips behind a set of horns as Schlatt laughs and leans forward.

Concrete, wet and viscous, begins to pour itself a makeshift structure around Tubbo. The crowd stirs slowly, out of sync, out of discomfort or uneasiness or anticipation. All of which don’t register quite right because this is more performance than observance now, and Tubbo is, for once, the main role.

“Schlatt?” he breathes, just as the man steps back.

Quackity gives him the smallest of sympathetic looks before pouring water down the sides and then Tubbo is encased, he is trapped in a box and it’s like being a kid again. Rain and wet cardboard and the hollow ring of an empty stomach.

Then there’s Tommy, who’s not looking because he’s tugging at Wilbur’s sleeve and Tubbo thinks Wilbur is going to do something, is going to save him, is going to be, not his brother - because he’s Tommy’s and Tubbo is only an extension of family - but close, a leader, something.

The concrete is suffocating and he can feel hands pressed against his throat even though no one’s there.

Schlatt calls Technoblade up to the stage and Tubbo goes limp, knows what's coming, knows soldiers don’t get sent to spies for small talk in front of a waiting sea.

* * *

“In the commune, we’re all equal,” Wilbur says with a smile and a small flourish.

His hair is matted to his forehead and his coat - brown and patchy and worn in place of the revolutionary uniform that Tubbo has also abandoned in the back of his room in the White House - drags against the small hills and valleys of the untouched land into exile.

Wilbur tells him about something, some word with too many syllables that crash into the sides of Tubbo’s skull, already filled to the brim with political jargon.

It’s sinking, it’s a folly, someone has to pay. Wilbur says that Tubbo’s the sort to hold onto something so tightly it'll break and then laughs off the way the railing splinters under his palm at the top of the spiral staircase.

Pogtopia doesn’t _feel_ like a commune, not how Tubbo’s heard it described. It feels like sickness, with musty air across the high walls of the ravine and rotting wood planks barely carrying the burden of stone down into its center.

Tubbo doesn’t feel equal to them when Wilbur demands to know what excuse he gave to escape Schlatt.

Trust isn’t enough when you don’t have any and Wilbur’s empty, empty eyes follow Tubbo all the way back to work the next morning.

* * *

Niki is yelling and no one’s listening to her, he can tell by the way she steps closer and Schlatt doesn’t even look down. Tubbo wants to reassure her that it’s fine, tell her to save her voice because his soul is already bound for beyond soundproof gates, but the noise in his own head is too loud.

The sound of his heartbeat, a timer set to ring at someone else’s set alarm. They are alike in that moment. In their shared silence. In their deafening screams.

Fundy, Big Q, Punz, more people with more names that wouldn’t mean anything to say; they don’t move. The show is about to begin and they have taken their seats.

Niki’s different, but she always has been, hasn’t she?

Tommy named the country for its men and Niki is not one of them. 

They do nothing. The men, that is.

Tubbo still mouths _Tommy_ anyway, because this isn’t the first time he’s going to greet death, but it is the first time he’s going to do it alone. Niki gets quieter as her pitch climbs and something desperate claws at her words, which means it’s all about to worse, but she’s still not giving up.

It’s never been more clear that she isn’t one of them. Wilbur is all smoke. Niki is ablaze.

* * *

_Techno is on our side,_ the message reads. Tubbo reads it in Wilbur’s voice, even with the distance between them.

The voice that commanded him as a soldier at war, the voice that shouted at Dream like he was more pest than world-patron, the voice that used to read Tubbo stories; a replacement for parents he’ll never know.

Tommy was always rowdy, too much energy in spindly limbs, so he’d never listened, but Wilbur and Tubbo had made it through shelves of the classics together. A low rumble in the man’s chest as Tubbo drifted to sleep, he learned to be lulled by tragedy.

Tubbo dies for the second time on a stage. The exhibition is over, the curtains should be shut, he thinks he hears a scream, but maybe it’s his own.

The colors are bright on the backs of his eyelids and Technoblade’s face tells him nothing. The pig won’t even meet his eyes.

There is a story he faintly recalls, of a hero was the first casualty of war. Who knew the risk, but took it anyway, who always somehow thought it wouldn’t be him.

* * *

“Hello Tubbo!” Niki chirps, a bird’s echo after Technoblade’s blank-faced drawl.

The sound reverberates around the hush that follows; they’ve made so much space for her, she still hasn’t learned how fill it. She mutters an apology when the words fall flat and Techno’s ear twitches slightly as he shakes his head.

 _That’s good,_ Tubbo muses, distantly. _They’re listening to her._

Niki’s found her version of home, apparently. Of people. Of security. In the very same people who first stripped it away.

She’s one of them now. Tubbo isn’t sure whether that knowledge make him wants to laugh or cry.

It’s almost funny how life turns out, but it’s also not at all.

The last time they stood together like this, was it on uneven footing, him in a suit and her on the ground? Was it when they made a promise to stick together no matter what, even while Wilbur paced circles and spoke to no one?

Wilbur’s dead now.

Tubbo is the last man standing, the leftover piece of a country that couldn’t, and Niki, its most resilient member, the kindest face across lands ravaged by war, warm milk and rising dough, is stood next to Technoblade in full netherite.

Pink hair peeks out of both of their helmets and Tubbo feels a hysterical sort of humor bubble up in his throat. Some quip about appearances and stupid habits and the things girls do at sleepovers rattles around his head around in a voice that isn’t his, but feels just as familiar.

Tommy’s dead too.

Niki is the ever-same amount of brave and bold and as she shifts her weight onto one leg and stares at him, Tubbo realizes that she is no longer screaming.

She is also no longer someone who would try and save his life.

* * *

Tubbo declares Snowchester free on the 21st of January, which is to say that the sky is a heavy grey and L’manberg is dead and gone and there is no more fire, but he’ll take what he can get these days.

He doesn’t make fun of Dream in their declaration. There’s no point, not really.

Dream’s not the enemy (although he is) and they didn’t fight him for this liberation (although they did). Tubbo just wants his claimed land to be something other than what everything else is, and if for that he has to put this kind of name on it, he will.

Revolution is an idea, but it isn’t _fun_ anymore. Nothing about weapon and armor and fear is fun at all, but it’s what he’s doing.

It’s a necessity of some kind, some blackened coal where his heart should be, lost to months of paranoia from all sides.

Tubbo spells the title of the documents wrong - _Independents,_ which they are, but that wasn’t quite the point and Jack Manifold spends minutes howling about it - and it’s almost as though nothing’s changed (although it has).

* * *

Over the edge of his stone parapet, the walls he built by hand, Tubbo locks eyes with Ranboo, who gives him an almost-imperceptible nod.

They are together in this, then. Ranboo has chosen him. Has chosen family over whatever these people have going on; a leader’s father and comrade-in-arms and closest friend in an organization hell-bent on destroying his legacy.

Niki asks Tubbo about Dream’s shield, about war, about the past, and Tubbo only doesn’t ask her about a bakery on the water and a tree she helped grow because he’s never been particularly good with words.

It’s a set, and that’s all he tells them. More than he’d like to in and of itself; it means that Tubbo’s metal chestplate and matching gear rightfully belongs to the man who only ever took it off as a gambit, who killed hopes and squandered dreams and has taken everything Tubbo’s ever had.

Wearing it means more than anything else ever could.

Tubbo jumps off of his bridge and lands with a crash on the ice, steadying himself so obviously, Phil gives him a pitying look that he pointedly ignores. Niki follows, Techno tilts his head, Tubbo silently prays to whatever powers Tommy used to go on about that Ranboo’s kept Michael safe.

Snowchester is built on trust and Tubbo has none for his ex-allies. None for his killer and a girl who’s stopped caring and a guy who never started in the first place.

He waits for their move. If they mean for him to die, Tubbo will do it with his voice chasing the wind and his blood marring the ice. Scarlet will not blend into black this time.

Tubbo is not a hero. He will not go quietly.

He will be an inferno; he will force Technoblade to watch.

**Author's Note:**

> All in all:
> 
> \- I spent so long reordering pieces of this fic and oh well, here it is  
> \- I always forget how much I care about c!Tubbo until I'm a thousand words deep and in pain over his journey thus far  
> \- March 16th was a lot  
> \- Check out my Tumblr! Same @, there's some diamonds in the rough on there


End file.
